A Trip to the Park

Written by Eva Barnsley

Parks have always had a special place in my heart. Today Sofia and I finally took our trip to the botanical gardens. We took a big Ganesha bag from Ishka full of patterns and took our shoes off. The sun said hello but brought the breeze as well, it was all that we could have asked for. We spread out a tapestry and sat in the grass taking photographs of each other. It had been too long. Too long since I had planted by body in the soil; too long since I had heard the birds; too long since I had looked up and seen nothing but branches full of life standing over me.

This was exactly what we needed - a trip to the park.

Horses Don't Die

by Sofia Bant

I've always loved the smell
of molasses.
We fed it to the horses
I got to know as a child
I can still hear their heavy
hooves beat the ground
covered in Maputo grass
I miss them and their rigid
coats
I miss what it feels like to
be carried by a divine creature
and look over a world made small by pubescent worries.
So now years later, in the middle of the Hanoi grass
I can smell the molasses that stuck to my hands
and the dust that sat under
my nails after holding the reigns
for too long.
Now in the middle of the
Hanoi grass
I see horses run by me when
I blink fast enough
the way I would imagine
them run with the car when I was three
and lonely staring out the window
Some of the horses I knew
then have died by now.
I cried when I found out
before I realised horses
don't die, you just stop riding them.
Their hooves beat clouds now
Their shoulders grew wings
Their sickness left behind in
their useless, earhtlhy corpses
Horses don't die
They rise
Angels don't fall
They hide.